


burn out bright

by ag_sasami



Category: Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name
Genre: Archived from FFN, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Gen, Trouble with Attachment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-25 19:17:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18580903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ag_sasami/pseuds/ag_sasami
Summary: This is the shape of violence in the body of a boy held together with staples and curses and cognitive dissonance.





	burn out bright

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this way back in 2010 when I still lived on FFN and HiNaBN had yet to be abandoned. I'm still rather fond of it.

He knew which spell she wanted before she told him to start drawing. It was just an _awful_ idea, but Sassy Bat wasn't really giving him any other options. So Hanna went about putting the runes on the floor in long sweeping strokes and sharp lines and whorls, growing ever more wary and bracing for its backlash.

Just a few final tense marks...

It was electricity and heat and intensely purple light so, so suddenly; all burning scars and fire in his chest and violent contorting in the pit of him. Hanna choked back the ohgodohgod _ohgod_ rising panicky in his lungs as the purple rune light peaked and dimmed. The magic ebbed away from the room. But his blood was boiling in his skin _hothot_ and painful and roaring through his brain and pulsing through his quaking bones and something bitter was rising up on the tail of the panic. He brought a hand to his face to steady the spin of the walls and the swell of the floor, body shuddering under the pain and stress of holding himself upright on three aching limbs.

 _Ohgodohgodohgodohgod._ There was just so, _so much_ blood, acrid and metallic in his nose and his mouth and thick in the back of his throat. And the room was still spinning too close ( _way_ too close) to Hanna's face as everything went dark and his elbows buckled beneath him.

 

_The future is a question mark of kerosene and electric sparks. There's still fire in you yet._

 

* * *

 

Each night he watches his parents die in graphic detail _overandoverandover_ again. Before, he would shout himself awake with ice in his veins, howling into the darkness. Shook hysterically. Grasped at his thin sheets, unable to clear the blood-spattered visions from his head.

Those were the easy nights; at least he got some sleep.

His abdomen is still poorly held together with scars that refuse to heal. Breathing pulls the staples at odd angles and when he drifts off to fitful sleep he can't regulate his inhalation into something shallow and measured. Instead, his breaths grow deep and steady and _ohsopainful_ as his body tears itself slowly apart. Skin pulls sharply in all the wrong directions, squeezing the air from him in a violent wail. Gasping as the staples just dig in again and _fuck._

Scream.

Gasp.

Swear.

Repeat until dawn.

At least, that's how it was when he lived alone, when Hanna would still scream shrill and bloodcurdling. Most nights his screaming would wake the neighbors. Now Gallahad sits at the foot of the bed most nights. The nightmare have slowed. When they do come, there is a warm orange glow and a hand on his shoulder, and for the first time in his life the bloody visions fade into inky black sleep again. But nothing stays the pain that rips through him (not even Worth's drugs), and Gallahad already worries too much without Hanna crying out like the dying. So now the nights spent screaming are instead spent staring at the ceiling, counting cracks and grinding his teeth until his jaw aches and the sun rises.

 

_I'm still discontented down here. I'm still discontented._

 

* * *

 

The day had brutalized him. Spectral burns from the runes left his torso raw and ablaze and every heartbeat was pulsing magic-tainted blood slowly through his veins. This time, "I'm okay," meant being doubled over on hands and knees on the shower floor retching black and toxic until his insides heaved dry. It meant sitting back in the blood-swirled water with knees pulled to his torn chest, sobbing silently for the overwhelming pain. It meant shaking for just a little longer than usual under the scalding water because in five years no one else had seen his scars but Doc Worth.

Now too suddenly there are these probing, insistent questions and concerned, unblinking orange stares over secrets he's never had to divulge. And even though someone now sits at the foot of his bed every night and makes him breakfast every morning, he still feels so desperately alone. It's _his_ pain and _his_ memories and no one can make those things go away; and no one has the right or responsibility to share that burden. So he smiles large and false and evasive, and {...} knows he's lying (Hanna can tell) but he lies anyway, keeping his constant companion at arm's length. "I'm fine," is an abrupt wall between Hanna and the things he wants, in a space he's never had to fill with lies.

It was better when no one knew. Better when his loneliness was less isolating, less confusing.

 

_We were young and the world was clear, but young ambition disappears. I swore it would never come to this: the average, the obvious._

 

* * *

 

If he tries hard enough, sometimes he can remember what his mother smells like, or the way his father used to carry him on his shoulders. He avoids it all the same because memories of his parents bring memories of their deaths and of all the ways his life is barely held together. Worth and Lamont have stood in as a surrogate, half-hearted family for him for the last few years; while he trusts them, it's not something innate. It's just that they're reliable and the ideal amount of aloof. Hanna doesn't want to be someone else's responsibility, and he especially does not want to be attached to anyone in any real familial way.

But when someone says "good night" as he falls asleep at the end of each day and each morning he wakes to the sizzle of bacon, it feels real and right and altogether horrifying. The unavoidable conclusion in Hanna's head is that the zombie is already kin. The words string themselves together wrong when he tries to spell out an explanation. The need to not be so close and the desire to remain detached are all too frequently tangled up in something that looks suspiciously like gratitude. Like security. The words to tell his partner just how much he wants him to leave (and just how relieved he is that he's stayed) don't exist in even the remotest sense. It's like he has a family again. There is no _trying_ to remember the dusty smell of his friend or the strength of dead arms dragging him to safety because those things are still very much real.

And really, how do you tell someone they're the best and worst thing that's happened to you in recent memory?

How do you express the need for something that feels like home when that is categorically the _last_ thing you're ready to accept. Suddenly he's so close to something that feels like complete happiness that he doesn't know how he could go back to living with the empty space it filled. He wants it so badly while hating the needy pang it leaves in his heart even more intensely. The circumstances of {...}'s unlife are ambiguous at best and the loss of one family is already too much to bear in a lifetime.

So Hanna finds himself hoping to wake up alone and without the looming threat of loss, all at once terrified that day is approaching faster than he can reasonably be prepared to face.

 

_Limping through this human race, you bite and claw your way back home but you're running the wrong way._

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Burn Out Bright](https://youtu.be/Mq9H8ebZnN4)


End file.
